The URL for this article is http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/berne2.htm

Boycotting
the Election for Emperor

by Geoff Berne (6-30-00)

www.tenc.net[emperors-clothes]

The
biggest question facing voters in November is not who for the next four
years will be President, but who will be our imperial
Commander-in-Chief.

When looked
on in that light is there any candidate who when pictured in that role
of responsibility doesn't terrify?

Bush or Gore:
can one picture either of these men astride the Emperor's horse,
waving the sword that sends us all into global battle? Bush and Gore:
can one picture either of these men making a stand against pressures
from the military to reinstate the draft?

In this
year's election, there is not even a lesser of two evils for the
voters to choose from, rather the evil of two lessers, two major
candidates of equally lesser worth posing an equal risk of keeping
America in a state of permanent war.

Nullification
of the difference between the two parties has been the name of the
game since the Republican Eisenhower was fitted in Roosevelt's New
Deal shoes. The Clinton era has been the coup de grace of this
political homogenization process: "Mr. Clinton," as
historian Walter A. McDougall describes it, "served to
consolidate the Reagan revolution by balancing the budget, reforming
welfare, and unleashing the private sector." McDougall could have
added that Mr. Reagan-Clinton also unleashed the military behemoth
that Reagan had created on the rest of the world on an unprecedented
epic scale, using Republican Cohen as Secretary of Defense and
holdovers from the Bush era military such as NATO commander Wesley
Clark and drug "czar" Barry McCaffrey to do so.

Gore promises
to press forward with the program of American world domination that
was charted so uninhibitedly by Mr. Clinton, including carrying on the
war to subdue Yugoslavia to its bitter end, however long it takes. The
reason this war was supposedly fought was to roust President Milosevic.
Yet Milosevic will leave office on his own volition anyway, when his
term expires a year from now, so why we ever got so excited about
Milosevic in the first place (would a "Hitler" be observing
term limits?) has become buried in permanent mystery. Not to be
deterred by this enemy's compliance with the terms of his
constitutionally mandated retirement, Gore has put on record his
commitment to preserve the peace process (i.e. keep the war going) in
Yugoslavia, presumably regardless of who the man in charge turns out
to be. Gore has lined himself up behind the idea that America should
pursue a policy of managing the affairs of other countries like
Yugoslavia under the guise of making them more "prosperous."
He has a slick new phrase for this: "forward engagement."
With such a policy we can look forward to having American troops in
Kosovo for another fifty years, just like Korea. (And how many other
countries soon to be named).

In short, if
you feel that you want to vote for peace, not war, cross off Gore.

And if the
news of oil price rises starts your mind going quiveringly in a
direction of deja vu with memories of words like "Kuwait"
and "Gulf War," watch out for young George Bush. With the
hue and cry being raised about soaring gas and oil prices by members
of Bush's party such as U.S. Congressman John Boehner and two
candidates for Commissioner in my own home county in Ohio, you can see
signs that the Republicans are gearing up to coast to victory,
nationally, on that issue. Why not? It worked for them in 1980 and
1988 and almost worked for them in 1992. Is it just a coincidence that
in 1978, 1986, and 1991, oil prices took a drastic hike and soon
afterwards a candidate named George Bush was running for President
either in the primaries or in the general election? Bush Sr. was a
wealthy oilman with many friends in the Middle East. Likewise, the
wealth of the latest Bush to run for President originates in a Texas
oil company with Middle East stakes, and his '00 Presidential campaign
is reliant on 1.5 million in donations from 670 oil-related companies.
Let's put it this way: when it comes to the setting of international
oil prices, the Bush family can, at the very least, not be above
suspicion as the culprit.

It's a matter
of record that in 1991 the Bush administration – at that time on
good terms with Saddam Hussein, one of America's top arms customers
– prodded Saddam to raise his oil prices, only to use outrage at
those prices to rally support for a war against this former ally who
who was holding American drivers by the throat.

Bush
miscalculated that the war would make him a hero who'd be a sure bet
for re-election in 1992. Even so, according to journalist Tom Flocco,
Bush Sr. may

be pursuing a
similar strategy again, this time on behalf of his son. Writing on the
website WorldNet Daily on March 24, '00, Flocco reports that on
January 15 of this year, with momentum growing for his son's
Presidential candidacy, George Bush Sr. visited Kuwait, where he is
revered as the country's savior on the basis of his defense of them in
the 1991 Gulf War. Bush met with "senior Kuwaiti officials."
According to Flocco the purpose was to improve his son's election
chances by "causing the electorate to become uneasy and
distressed about oil-caused economic problems." All the Kuwaiti
sheikhs needed to do, says Flocco, was convince OPEC to "hang
tough with oil production cuts until summer, or at least limit the
production increases . . . if just until Junior was safely
elected."

One would
like to fantasize that the elder Bush will somehow find himself
confronted with public questioning of this trip, with its implication
of a Bush role in an oil price fix. In the meantime I'm simply
wondering if voters will be gullible enough to buy the idea that the
way to register a protest against higher oil prices is to elect as
President – a millionaire oilman!

A vote for
George W. is a vote for deja vu all over again, with ghosts of past
foreign wars and covert actions such as Nicaragua, El Savador, Panama,
Grenada, and Kuwait coming back to haunt us in the incarnations of
such names as Brent Scowcroft, Richard Perle, and Colin Powell –
foreign policy counsellors left over from the Bush heir's popularly
rejected daddy's security team.

So, abandon
hope, ye who thought an election would bring a candidate who'd tear up
the Clinton-Bush script of military barnstorming around the world and
plundering of the world's militarily and economically weaker peoples.
Rather than call it an election, which the American mind instinctively
thinks of as a contest between two philosophically distinct parties,
let's call it what it is, an audition for a part in a video treatment
of the story of David and Goliath, with two distinctly second-rate
hams vieing for the part of Goliath.

The rivalry
of the two auditioners has already heated up and advanced to the stage
of breast-beating and sword-brandishing on the subject of Iraq. The
script chosen for their audition in this last week of June was a
modern version of the bombastic roarings of the "miles gloriosus"
(the preposterously macho soldier] of ancient Roman comedy, each
trying to outdo the other in avowals of determination to crush George
Bush Sr.'s old nemesis, Saddam Hussein. First it was Gore, swearing
that his commitment to remove Saddam takes a backseat to nobody. Then
Bush Jr. put forth his snarling lieutenant Perle to impress Senators
with the superiority of his patron's bloodthirsty intentions toward
Baghdad's beast.

Faced with
this choice of war-primed imperial dauphins, I have decided that, at
least as of this date, June 28, 2000, a stance of rejecting both of
them and not voting at all is the way for an American who's at all
concerned about this country's recent drift towards World War III to
make a statement.

That being
said, however, the question will arise: how about a third party
alternative?

Unfortunately
the third and fourth parties, like the two principal ones, offer
voters wanting to register opposition to wars of the Bush-Clinton era
no real alternative.

Surely, for
example, a vote for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader gives every
indication of being a futile way to protest the trend to war. For in
spite of launching a seemingly brave and aggressive assault on the
culture of corporate greed that has corrupted our democracy and
despoiled the planet, Nader has not indicated that he even has a
foreign policy! A survey of Nader's weekly columns (entitled "In
the Public Interest") from the first day of NATO's bombing of
Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999 right up to today shows that he has not
seen fit to devote a single column to the subject! Nor did his
acceptance speech for the Presidential nomination of the Green Party
on June 25th devote one word to this savage 78 day military
onslaught, and the establishment of an American occupation presence in
the Balkans that's projected to last into eternity, that have made a
mockery of the causes and themes to which Mr. Nader has devoted his
life. For example:

Denying Citizens their
Rightful Control over Government:

Our armed forces were
unlawfully committed to war by the President without a
declaration by Congress.

Toxic Poisoning of the
Environment:

The ancient landscapes
of Balkan Europe from the banks of the Danube to the mountains
of Bulgaria were contaminated with residues of cancer-causing
nuclear-encased cluster bombs.

Victimization of Children
and the Aged:

The most vulnerable
sectors of the Yugoslavian population were wracked with
starvation and massive scales of illness due to NATO sanctions
on shipment of food and medicine. Hundreds of thousands of
refugees including juvenile and elderly Serbs and other ethnic
groups such as Albanians loyal to the Yugoslavian federal
government were and continue to be uprooted from their homes in
Kosovo, many dying, taking refuge in besieged ghetto
communities, or living in subsistence conditions where they have
taken refuge elsewhere in Yugoslavia.

Distortion of Public
Information by the Media:

Authoritarian control
of war reporting was imposed on the U.S. mass media, resulting
in the publication of disinformation and lies such as the
fictitious Racak massacre and mass burial in the Trepca mines.

The Destruction of the
Public Sector:

While Nader champions
the sovereignty of the public sector in America itself in such
areas as broadcasting, transportation, housing, health care, and
education, he made no objection to the wrecking of
government-run industries, media, courts, food distribution,
housing, and transportation in Kosovo and the installation in
their place of government by pro-Albanian racketeers,
terrorists, and racists who have conducted a mini-holocaust
against the Yugoslavian Serbs.

Where were
the admonitory words of Ralph Nader while these crimes were happening
under his nose? What credibility could he have as a candidate for
President if fifteen months after the war started, and thirteen months
after it ended, he finally decided to take a position on it?

And, for that
matter, what credibility can be assigned to the anti-war utterances of
the Reform Party's Pat Buchanan, who has condemned American action in
Kosovo but whose idea of a continent-based foreign policy is sending
troops to El Paso to defend against illegal entry of Mexicans?
Buchanan disdains America's post-Cold War interventions in Iraq and
Kosovo but boasts of victories over communism in such Cold War
military missions as Nicaragua, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Cuba, and
Korea that set in motion the military and intelligence establishments
that deform our economy and society today.

If one seeks
to derail the two would-be emperors, George II and Al(exander) the Not
so Great, a vote for today's two third party standard-bearers, barring
some miraculous renunciation of their past acquiescence in America's
imperialistic ascendancy, shows all the signs of being a wasted
protest vote.

No, faced
with such a spectrum of standard-bearers, those of us who seek to
resist the institutionalization of foreign war-making that has so
accelerated under President Clinton must conclude that not voting at
all is the ultimate protest, signifying not apathy but the highest
activism. If the vote total can dip below twenty, or even fifteen, per
cent, history will record the election of '00 as a washout, thus
depriving the "world's last great superpower" of the right
to call itself a democracy or use democratic performance as the
criterion by which to judge which countries of the world will pass the
test versus which will be clubbed into submission.

So in
November, if you care about the world you live in, I say sit down and
be counted, exercise your sacred right to not vote!

Geoff
Berne is a southwestern Ohio newspaper and internet contributor and
political consultant.

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